Chipzilla has just written a $13.5 billion cheque to buy its Jerusalem-based partner MobilEye.

MobilEye is one of the largest players in autonomous vehicle tech and hit the headlines recently when it had a spat with Tesla following a fatal Model S crash in Florida. However, it recently teamed with Intel on BMW's iNext self-driving platform, which the automaker aims to put into service by 2021.

Intel and MobileEye’s cunning plan is to build a "scalable architecture" that can be used by any automaker, especially if they don't want to build their own tech from scratch.

It could become a huge money maker for both Intel and MobilEye, which may help explain the huge acquisition price. The deal is one of the largest acquisitions of an Israeli-based tech company ever.

Compared to PC hardware autonomous cars, are one of the sexist things in tech, with virtually every automaker, tech company and even peripheral firms like Uber and Lyft working on (and fighting about) something.

Intel’s acquisition of Mobileye was officially confirmed this morning, and it will mark a huge investment in self-driving cars for the chip company. Intel previously said it will spend $250 million over the next two years toward the development of autonomous vehicles, but a $15 billion deal is far more significant.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the acquisition of Mobileye brings together the assets of Intel’s Xeon processors, FPGAs, 3D XPoint memory, and 5G modems with the world leader in automotive computer vision.

“This acquisition essentially merges the intelligent eyes of the autonomous car with the intelligent brain that actually drives the car."

Intel’s interest in Mobileye could help it against competitors like Nvidia and Qualcomm. Both chip makers have been investing in vehicles, and Intel appears to be paying a premium to catch up and push forward with its autonomous vehicle plans.

A team of American and Israeli boffins have used twisted vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second.

This makes it about the fastest wireless network that we can think of. The technique is likely to be used in the next few years.

Twisted signals use orbital angular momentum to stuff more data into a single stream. WiFi, LTE, COFDM modulates the spin angular momentum of radio waves, not the angular momentum.

The boffins, Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, twisted together eight ~300Gbps visible light data streams using orbital angular moment. Each of the eight beams has a different level of twist.

The beams are bundled into two groups of four, which are passed through different polarization filters. One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream while the other four are transmitted around the outside.

The beam is then transmitted over open space (just one meter in this case), and untwisted and processed by the receiving end. 2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second, or around seven full Blu-ray movies per second. Needless to say there is a lot of porn that can be shifted on that sort of network.

Never mind worrying about script kiddies, in Israel you have to worry about your systems being hacked by the mayor. According to Aretz Tiberias Mayor Zohar Oved will be prosecuted for conspiring to commit a crime, infiltrating a computer system and invasion of privacy.

The State Prosecutor's Office said the mayor copied material from the municipal computer server and three other computers to stop a whistle-blower revealing details which might lead Oved to face corruption charges. Oved ordered Avner Sharon, the owner of a computer firm, to carry out the hack as part of a case against a whistleblower Benny Eliahu.

A local disciplinary court convicted Eliahu of misreporting his hours worked and improperly passing information to a journalist. It used information that Oved and Sharon had found on the server.

Eliahu appealed the ruling to the Petah Tikva District Court, which last month acquitted him of all the charges. Eliahu was granted "protected whistle-blower" status which meant he could not have been dismissed.

Judge Noga Ohad ruled that hacking Eliahu's personal email mailbox was an invasion of his privacy, equivalent to searching through his intimate personal effects or through a drawer in his office that contains personal items. Oved is already on trial for violating income limits and forging corporate documents, allegations related to the 2003 mayoral elections.

Chip giant Intel has rushed out and purchased a tiny Israeli PC virtualization start-up Neocleus. While this is not the biggest buy-out Intel has done, it is certainly one of the strangest.

Neocleus was bought for few hundred thousand dollars, which is less than the Intel CEO Paul Otellini's entertainment cabinet budget. The company's 15-20 employees will join Intel Israel's R&D center.

Neocleus CEO Ariel Gorfung and CTO Etay Bogner founded the company in 2006. However, it did not end up doing very well. Over the years, its investors poured $22 million into the outfit. Most of the investment was by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds, who are unlikely to see any of their money back.

Intel was never a partner of Neocleus, but the start-up uses Chipzilla gear for its virtualization. It seems that Intel has seen something useful in the pile of technology Neocleus came up with and bought the startup as cheap as chips.